The spirits world was stupefied last summer when an anonymous buyer from Asia paid around $19 million for an incredibly rare cask of Ardbeg single malt distilled in 1975. The nearly-50-year-old whisky is the oldest liquid the cult Islay brand has ever released; but the price of the lone cask is more than double what Ardbeg’s owner, the Glenmorangie Co., paid for the entire distillery including all its stock in 1997, as the Financial Times pointed out. It also smashed the previous record for a single cask by several million dollars.
Do the math though and the buyer is actually getting a pretty good deal. With bottles of 50-year-old single malts from distilleries of similar repute routinely fetching around $50,000—or even more if they are in bespoke decanters such as the ones produced by The Macallan and Bowmore—on the rare occasions they are available. The 1975 Ardbeg cask’s per-bottle breakdown comes to
